
Just like the Time Tunnel, music has the ability to transfer us from one period to another and is able to reconstruct for us the previous generations’ emotional experiences. Music has the power to teach us that our joys and sorrows, our loves and hates are not different from those of other human beings in the present or in past times.
Music teaches us about things that are common to us and to others: to us here and to others elsewhere; to us now and to others anytime else. But in order to sense the musical experiences of the past in their full vigour, it is not enough to perform the notes just as they appear on the score pages.
We, in Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra and thousands of other musicians in Israel and abroad believe that the manner by which the notes are sounded, the instruments used, the performance practices that try to draw as near as possible to those that were customary at the time when the music was composed – all of these features in the performance of early music enhance the emotional and intellectual message of the music of those days, while it is played for modern ears.
We invite our listeners to set with us out for a journey in the wondrous and magical sound world of the 17th and 18th centuries. The masterpieces of the baroque period, those that are well known and those again that are less known, when they are played with period instruments and performance practices, will reveal to us the richness and strength of the emotional experience embedded in the baroque music, which in spite of its being hundreds of years old, has not lost its flavor until this very day.
David Shemer